It was Mensa be… The high IQ society that has been testing us for 70 years

What does the head of Mensa in Britain watch on television? University Challenge? Mastermind? Pointless?

None of the above. Instead of brain teasers and impatient quiz mastering from Jeremy Paxman, one of the country’s most intelligent people has another hero. Jack Bauer.

‘I quite like vegging out to fairly inane programmes. I’m quite looking forward to 24 coming back,’ said Chris Tyler, the chairman of British Mensa. ‘I don’t watch anything that is particularly considered highbrow.’

He and his fellow Mensa members, or Mensans, are a mixed bunch, he told Metro. Some of them love watching a good TV quiz show; some of them love appearing on a TV quiz show and some of them just want to sit back and watch Louis Walsh.

‘There are members that are on University Challenge and there are members that watch it. There are members who like quiz programmes but there are probably just as many who like watching The X Factor and Dancing on Ice.’

The message is clear: people with high IQs watch the same terrible programmes as the rest of us.

Mensa was founded in 1946 and Tyler joined back in the 1980s, when completing an IQ test online was just a warped fantasy. He saw an advert in a newspaper and decided to take a test, which he filled in and posted off. Once Mensa realised he met its criteria – you need an IQ in the top two per cent of the population – he was invited to become a member.

For the next 15 years or so, Tyler was content to receive the Mensa magazine in the post and fill out a few puzzles. But then he decided to get involved.

He went to his first Mensa meeting in a pub – before the internet, people used to meet regularly in pubs – but it wasn’t what he expected.

‘I was very nervous walking into a pub to meet this image in my head of bearded eggheads, but it was totally the opposite – apart from the fact that the chap who took the group did have a beard! They were very welcoming and made me feel right at home very quickly.

‘I just assumed that the meetings were lots of bearded people sat round discussing physics – it’s actually totally untrue. They tend to discuss exactly the same things that I discuss with colleagues at work. The only difference is perhaps you couldn’t spout something that was rubbish in a Mensa discussion because you would probably be called to task very quickly. It tends to be quite challenging discussions but it’s exactly the same things I’ve discussed at work or down the pub.’

When not carrying out his Mensa duties, Tyler, 49, from Milton Keynes, works in sales. He is in his fourth year as chairman of Mensa in Britain, which has 21,000 members.

There are a variety of IQ tests out there measuring verbal and numerical skills, but Mensa mainly uses the Cattell III B and the Cattell Culture Fair III A tests. To become a member, a supervised two-and-a-half hour test must be completed. The average person has an IQ of about 100. A score of 130 to 150, depending on the test used, should be good enough to get into Mensa.

But what’s the point of being a Mensan if you can’t brag about how high your intelligence quotient (IQ) is, right? Wrong.

‘It is one of those things that members never discuss,’ said Tyler, who can’t remember his own IQ because it was revealed to him so long ago. ‘It’s not something where people are boasting about what their IQ is. Everybody just gets on.’

Surprisingly, Tyler doesn’t believe a high IQ is something to boast about anyway.

‘Intelligence is something that should be encouraged but it’s something that’s totally misunderstood,’ he said. ‘Everyone thinks if you’re a member of Mensa you’re really good at a pub quiz. But a pub quiz is general knowledge, it’s not intelligence. I might be able to solve a mathematical puzzle quicker than the average member of society, but if I go to a pub quiz I’m not normally in the top half.’

For Tyler, intelligence is the ability to think fast and solve problems quickly, but while he maintains a high IQ is helpful, it isn’t necessarily life-changing.

‘It’s a physical characteristic in the same way that if you measured people’s heights. Your IQ should remain relatively constant. Your IQ is just your natural ability. Like any characteristic, it’s what you do with it. There are probably some people with average or even below average IQs who have achieved far more than people with high IQs because of application, and that is actually more important. It’s a tool but it’s what you do with the tool.’

There is a stigma to being smart, however, one which Tyler thinks isn’t as keenly felt among Mensa members outside Britain.

‘In America, high IQ is – I won’t say revered – but people genuinely seem to respect it and encourage it, while in this country it almost seems to be viewed poorly. It might be the British not liking to boast – maybe that’s why members tend not to quote what their actual IQ is. Maybe it’s seen as being big-headed.’

He says many Mensans leave details of their membership off their CVs for fear of putting off potential employers.

If it’s somewhat challenging to get into Mensa, it’s almost impossible to gain membership to a number of other intelligence organisations.

While about one in 50 people could become a Mensan if they took a test, only one in 30,000 can pass the test to get into the Prometheus Society, which was established in 1982. Its members have to be in the 99.997th percentile, compared to Mensa’s 98th. As a result, the Prometheus Society has only 120 members worldwide.

Greek psychiatrist and psychotherapist Dr Evangelos Katsioulis is the founder of the World Intelligence Network, including HELLIQ, which has just 87 members and the same percentile requirement as Prometheus. One of HELLIQ’s latest members is four-year-old Sherwyn Sarabi, from Barnsley, South Yorkshire, who has an IQ of 160.

Asked if a high IQ means someone is more intelligent, he said: ‘Does a nice picture mean someone is more beautiful? IQ scores are only pictures taken of an entity called intelligence with specific cameras under specific conditions. If you take many pictures of a specific theme under different conditions, under different angles, under different lighting, with different cameras, would you have the same picture as a result? I may guess not. It is the same with IQ testing.’

Dr Katsioulis set up the World Intelligence Network in 2001 and today it comprises 44 different high IQ societies, made up of 57,000 members.

He said: ‘Intelligence is a mental quality, ability, which is strongly related to the perception and information process. Intelligence can be considered not only the amplitude of perception, but also the speed of information process and reasoning and the decision taking based on this analysis. Intelligence is what underlines Plato’s and Aristotle’s philosophy, Da Vinci’s concepts, Beethoven’s music, Einstein’s theory, Dali’s paintings.’